Beijing - Day 1 (8/9/10)

Yes, it took a trip to China to get me to restart my blog which I began at Google New Hire training in December of 2006. I'm not sure if the name is gonna stick but for now it will. Why am I writing on blogger this morning? Well, I was going to log-in to Facebook this morning to post a "I'm here, it's hot and here's a picture of some food" post when I got a "This Webpage is not available" message. Oh yeah, I forgot. Twitter is also not happening here in China. And when I say not happening, I mean not "allowed" to happen. The good news is that I'm already feeling more productive without Fbook and Tweets to suck me in, etc. I'm happy to note that it appears YouTube is up but folks I've talked to note that's not always the case. (update, it's only up for me as I'm in the office on Google servers. Real Chinese folks can't watch YouTube)

Anyway, I left SFO at 12n on Saturday, arrived 12 hours later in Beijing at 3:15p on Sunday. Only slept an hour but had a pretty pleasant trip otherwise.

I tend to pride myself on managing well between time zones so I challenge myself to stay up til 9p (local) which was 6am Sunday morning in San Francisco. Thanks to a new friend of a friend, I managed to get out for dinner (hot pot!) which got me through the few hours I needed to stay awake. After 22 hours awake (sat/sun blur), I slept 10 and I'm now at Google's office in Beijing where it's easy to feel at home. Included below is a picture of my first Chinese breakfast. I'm digging the cold coffee in can...

I'm starting to get a bit long-winded so let me end with a bunch of words/phrases that have occurred to me since I got here almost 20 hours ago.

• Hot
• Chaotic
• Commerce
• "Aromatic"
• big
• growing

Will try to post more as the mood stikes. Sorry Facebook, I'm blogging now...